LOVER

Tower of Babel

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Praise be to God for confounding our tongues and scattering us into exile  like chaff in a stray wind or the fig seeds dropped by a green iguacaon on a        hogplum. Confusion is sweetest chirimoya on a dry tongue.  Hymns of disorder bring bountiful harvests in times of drought,  And perhaps only cross-eyes can see in chaos serene mandalas.  I shout from the top of my Babel’s tower sown as a kapok tree—  Blessed are the dialects, the patois, the argots, and the pidgins;  the half-breed word-hoards and the mongrel grammars; the geechees,  the calós, and the ghost words; those hallowed languages gone dead  or worse extinct because of genocide or conquest or just time’s erosion,  yet how we must mourn each one in our bones, hearts, spleens;  then join hands by the sea at dawn to chant their names in flames  of gumbo-limbo, O so many to remember: Elmolo, Mawa, Ba-Shu,  Koibal, Guanche, Calusa, Wichita, and the Taíno of my own island— Kubanakán—whose words linger past the cyclones of our sadness like flotsam chromosomes or castaway fossils of such beautiful amber  as barbacoa, canoa, fotuto, hamaca, iguana, malanga, tabaco, yuca.   With these words I make machines of memory in flesh and marrow.  With these words I glide and cleave the tidal waves of history.   With these words I take root in the quicksands of diaspora.

I am trying to piece together the remarkable fragments of last night's procession. I want to share them and I think a list form is best:

-T and I biked together to the starting location of the parade, and upon arrival, stopped in the street on my bike I felt something hit me on the shoulder. I looked around me. I suspected some kids had thrown something. But I looked on the ground and there was a dead dove. The bird had struck a power line right above me and had died and fallen. I called T back--knowing her love of dead things--and she picked the dove up and carried it out of the street. I felt ominous about it. But as the night went on, I thought about its deeper meaning. Of course, I thought maybe it means I will die this year. Or maybe it has nothing to do with death, but with love. Or maybe it was a message from the higher self that is often described as a dove. 

-Not longer after that, an old woman stopped us on the street and asked if we had just been married. I was wearing all black and T was wearing a long sort of lacy wedding dress. And then I saw a braided weave in the street that I thought was a snake. 

-A handful of a traditional dessert made by a Greek friend. It was spicy and studded with pomegranates and it made me think of the underworld and how we are told not to eat there. 

-The slow, solemn walk to the river. And when the band led us down into the muddy, grassy lane along the edge of the tracks and under the dark overpass, we had to seek dry land and T getting caught in the mud with her bike and calling out in the distress "I am having a very really Neverending Story moment right now" as some tender punk kid tried to come to her rescue. 

-Everything else is kinda secret and sacred. How do you share that? A circle of roses around a fire. Waltzes on the sand. That monstrous barge that came ashore during the storm and now lies there beached and forgotten. I was thinking how we often equate the season to the crone, but what is overlooked sometimes is that Halloween is also the season of the young child--she too bides her time here in playfulness, right next to Death. The winding way, the stars overhead. How we've witnessed those in our community grow and evolve over the years. The way back. Thinking that we've done this enough years to know that one year it will be us collecting the light from the other side of the river -

It took me 3 years, relentless and fierce work, endurance, hope and the spinning supporting loving magic of a fully righteous community to get me here. And I am here. Home. I've not been this happy since forever. O, the work and creativity that's coming! How we can be when we are safe. Home is a precious privilege I never take for granted. I already love this one with my whole heart. The list of people who got me here is loooooong - each and every one of you: my door is always open 🌻 come on over, I'll sing you a song 🌻